San Jose High School History

San Jose High School began
in a room above Orbon’s flour store at 210 South First Street in 1863.A new $20,000 building, located on
Santa Clara Street between 6th and 7th streets in what
was subsequently called Horace Mann School, opened on January 1, 1868.After 1898, it was moved to a $75,000
brick and stone three-story building located on Washington Square, but on April
18, 1906, it was destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake.For the following two years, classes
were held in the Lincoln School building on Almaden Avenue.It was reported in the October “Bell”
that space was so tight that the girls had to stop wearing fluffy starched
skirts because of the jam on the stairways. In 1908, it presided on San
Fernando Street, San Jose State University’s present location, until the state
of California evicted SJHS in 1951 because of the expanding San Jose State
College and the growth of higher education.The state that had given SJHS permission, by act of the
State Legislature, to build on the state college land, withdrew its hospitality
and ordered the school torn down.From
1952 to the present, SJHS has been located at 24th and Julian.The original school subsequent to
renovations in later years cost over $2,500,000.In 1952, the original building was selected by the Museum of
Modern Art in NYC as one of the forty-three outstanding buildings of the
postwar period.In December of
1955, construction began on the music building, room 60.A major addition to the school program
was the $137,000 swimming pool that was first used on Tuesday, September 29,
1959.Two new wings, the 70’s and
80’s, of ten rooms opened in September of 1961. A full-dress stage was also added
to the cafeteria in 1961.As a
result of the Federal desegregation order of December, 1985, San Jose High
School was renamed San Jose High Academy, becoming a district magnet school
with a focus on academic excellence, technology, and personalized
education.Specialized programs
such as the International Baccalaureate and Aviation/Aerospace were added with
the IB program still in place to this day. Since 1999, the school also has offered the IB Middle Years
Program.In 1990, SJHA was
selected as a California Distinguished High School. A new state-of-the-art Career Technology Engineering
building was opened for classes in September of 2010. The new
13,000-square-foot facility houses both the Engineering program and the Project
Lead the Way Pre-engineering Program.